Review

Review Summary: Mathy post-punk that doesn't care if you call it math rock.

Here are a few useful facts to know about Adebisi Shank: (read in order of preference, however top-to-bottom is the only order than makes sense)

Adebisi Shank is a instrumental rock band consisting of three human male players: drummer Mick, guitarist Lar and bassist/bleeps man Vinny. Mick and Lar moonlight in a band called Terrordactyl while Vinny releases kitschy electronic music as The Vinny Club.

This Is The Album Of A Band Called Adebisi Shank, released on the DIY Richter Collective label, is the follow-up to 2007’s This Is The EP Of A Band Called Adebisi Shank. Produced by legendary punk rocker J. Robbins (Jawbox, Government Issue), it re-uses precisely 0 tracks from the latter.

Adebisi Shank’s ethos lies firmly within the experimental post-hardcore tradition, as the band utilise varying degrees of dissonance and irregular rhythms to reflect a web of influences that ranges from metal (two handed tapping), post-punk (angular guitar riffs), blues (call-and-response routines) and funk (precise, jazz-inflected grooves), producing a sound that is both accessible and disquieting.

Van Halen may not be the most obvious reference point, beyond the central role tapping plays in the group’s sound, but Adebisi Shank have clearly inherited some of the brothers’ symbiotic instincts: while Lar as the guitarist is invariably the music’s focal point, it’s a steely rhythm section that makes sense of the frequent tempo shifts, with Mick in particular keeping it simple at all costs.

Opener ‘You Me’ is what people generally refer to as a baptism of fire, the fire in this case being a chaotic flurry of loosely-related guitar notes and an electric current of a bassline that soon resolves to more melodic pastures with the introduction of a talkbox (the only instance where vocals appear on the album).

The talkbox, reminiscent of Slash, hints at a classic rock tendency that recurs throughout the album. It pops up again on the wonderfully-named ‘Shunk’ which, alongside ‘Colin Skehan,’ best exhibits Lar’s instrumental prowess, as he leads off heavy blues riffs and intersperses them with maniacal tapping and pick scrape routines.

The clean, tightly-strung jazz licks that open ‘Colin Skehan’ acknowledge a debt to Irish post-rock outfit Redneck Manifesto, while ‘Minirockers’ is, as its name suggest, a teenage metalhead’s wet dream, as Lar unleashes every guitar nerd trick and effect in his enviable arsenal.

I have no idea who Colin Skehan is but you can creep him on Stalkbook if you know how to work a Google search.

Clocking in at just 23 minutes, This Is The Album Of A Band Called Adebisi Shank can easily be listened to twice in the space of an hour. Use the rest of the time to make drinks.

‘You Me’ and ‘Snakehips’ can be streamed in the little box below the tracklist. If suitably impressed, feel free to support independent music by picking the album up for a mere €10/$14 from the Richter Collective’s own website: